Representing the Good Neighbor

Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream

Carol A. Hess

Description

Winner of the 2015 Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society

In Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream, Carol A. Hess investigates the reception of Latin American art music in the US during the twentieth century. Hers is the first study to probe Latin American art music in relation to Pan Americanism, or the idea that the American nations are bound by common aspirations. Under the Good Neighbor policy, crafted by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to cement hemispheric solidarity amid fears of European fascism, Latin American art music flourished and US critics applauded it as "universal." During the Cold War, however, this repertory assumed a very different status. While the United States supported Latin American military dictators to assuage fears that communism would overwhelm the hemisphere, musical works were increasingly objectified through essentializing adjectives such as "exotic," distinctive," or "national"--through the filter of difference.

Hess explores this phenomenon by tracking the reception in the United States of the so-called Big Three: Carlos Chávez (Mexico), Heitor Villa-Lobos (Brazil), and Alberto Ginastera (Argentina). She also evaluates several important US composers and critics-Copland, Thomson, Rosenfeld, and others-in relation to Pan Americanism, and offers a new interpretation of a work about Latin America by US composer Fredric Rzewski, 36 Variations on "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!" Whether discussing works performed in modern music concerts of the 1920s, at the 1939 World's Fair, the inauguration of the New York State Theater in 1966, or for the US Bicentennial, Hess illuminates ways in which North-South relations continue to inform our understanding of Latin American art music today. As the first book to examine in detail the critical reception of Latin American music in the United States, Representing the Good Neighbor promises to be a landmark in the field of American music studies, and will be essential reading for students and scholars of music in the US and Latin America during the twentieth-century. It will also appeal to historians studying US-Latin America relations, as well as general readers interested in the history of American music.

II. Absolute Mexican Music: "True Classicism" and Universalism in the AmericasChapter Four: Carlos Chávez's H.P.: Dialectical Indigenism, Mestizaje, and the Politics of SamenessI. To "Suggest Objectively the Life of All America": Chávez and Dialectical Indigenism.II. "Find Me a Primitive Man": Premiere and Reception

Chapter Five: Brazilian Modernism and the Making of"American Rhythm": Villa-Lobos at the 1939 World's FairI. From "Hallucinated City" To Democracity: Villa-Lobos, the Many Faces of Brazilian Modernism, and the Good NeighborII. Caliban Unbound: Villa-Lobos and Unsublimated PrimitivismChapter Six: The Golden Age: Pan Americanist Culture, War, and the Triumph of UniversalismI. Pan Americanist Culture and Music in the United StatesII. Folklore Cults and the "League of Minor Musical Nations" III. Nationalism: The "Greatest Foe" IV. "The Brazilian Oklahoma! and the Memory of Universalism Chapter Seven: Alberto Ginastera's Bomarzo: Sublimation and the Annihilation of DifferenceI. Ginastera in the United States: Becoming a "Musical McNamara"II. Bomarzo: Sublimation and the "Strength of theRepressed Urge"III. Censorship and the Limits of Aleatory Chapter Eight: Memory, Music, and the Latin American Cold War: Frederic Rzewksi's Variations on 'The People United Will Never Be Defeated!I. Nueva Canción, Música Nacional, and the Cold WarII. "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!" and the Rhetoric of MemoryChapter Nine: Epilogue. Utopia and Pan Americanism's Legacy Bibliography

Representing the Good Neighbor

Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream

Carol A. Hess

Author Information

Carol A. Hess is Professor of Musicology at University of California, Davis. She is author of Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898-1936 (Chicago, 2001, winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the Robert M. Stevenson prize for outstanding scholarship in Iberian music) and Sacred Passions: The Life and Music of Manuel de Falla (Oxford 2004).

Representing the Good Neighbor

Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream

Carol A. Hess

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2015 Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society "This brilliant book offers the first critical analysis of the reception of Latin American art music in the US during and after the Cold War... Highly recommended." --Choice

"[A] masterful reception history of works...[a] fascinating, valuable addition to the scholarship on 'American Music'."--Journal of the Society for American Music